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ENDING SLAVERY
At the start of of the Civil War in 1861,four million enslaved African Americans lived in the South working mostly on large cotton, rice, and tobacco plantations. By the end of the Civil War in 1865, these four million enslaved African Americans were free people. Slavery ended largely as a result of the actions of enslaved people during the war.
At the start of the war Abraham Lincoln and most white northerners were not interested in ending slavery. They just wanted to preserve the Union and believed that ending slavery would make that task more difficult. And many white northerners had been shaped by the racist climate of the time and had very little sympathy for African Americans. Lincoln did believe in the gradual end of slavery but argued this would not happen until the very distant future.
Lincoln also believed that when slavery ended, slave owners should be compensated and African Americans should be removed from the United States and resettled to Central America, the Caribbean or Africa.
Enslaved and free African Americans, however, had something else in mind. The wanted an immediate and uncompensated end to slavery and full citizenship.
As soon as the war started, thousands of slaves freed themselves by leaving their plantations and escaping to Union lines. Thousands of other African Americans in the North sent petitions to Lincoln urging him to make ending slavery one of the primary objectives of the war. These petitions also demanded that black men be allowed to fight to help bring a swift end to slavery.
Lincoln’s position on slavery began to change partly in response to pressure from African Americans and white abolitionists and partly out of military consideration. Lincoln began to believe that disrupting slavery in the South would improve the North’s military position.
In 1862 he supported the second confiscation act which freed runaway slaves, called “contraband.” He also issued the preliminary emancipation in 1862 demanding the South end slavery by January 1, 1863 and then in 1863 issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves held in bondage in parts of confederate states still in rebellion. The emancipation proclamation also called for the enlistment of black men in the Union Army.
Finally when the war ended in April 1865, Congress formally abolished slavery everywhere when it passed the 13th amendment to the U.S. constitution. The North made the southern states ratify the 13th amendment as a condition for being readmitted to the United States. By December 18, the amendment was ratified.
PRESIDENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION
In April, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and replaced by Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson. Johnson adopted a lenient policy toward the defeated confederate states allowing them to reconstitute their state governments and regain their political rights fairly easily. The defeated confederate states quickly passed a series of laws called Black Codes. The codes were designed to ensure that newly freed slaves remained economically, politically, and socially subordinate to whites. Black Codes included laws that required black children to be apprenticed to white people, curfews and pass laws were imposed on formers slaves, freed men and women were banned from fishing and hunting and owning firearms and forced to sigh labor contracts with conditions that resembled slavery.
RADICAL OR CONGRESSIONAL RECONSTRUCTION
Many Americans became outraged at the South’s treatment of ex-slaves and Johnson’s decision to abandon freed people. African Americans, in particular, began to put political pressure on the federal government to protect African American rights and lives. In the fall of 1866 the Republican Party won a veto proof majority in Congress. The radical faction of the party (Radical Republicans) pushed through a new Reconstruction Act. The Reconstruction Act put the South under military occupation and it required rebel states to write new constitutions with black men as participants and required that these new constitutions provide newly freed black men the right to vote. It also required states to ratify the 14th amendment to regain representation in Congress.
THE REPUBLICAN COALITION
The Reconstruction Act led to a political revolution in the South. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans joined the Republican Party and along with white northern (carpetbaggers) and some white southern (scalawags) allies seized control of most southern legislatures. Over 2,000 African Americans were elected to public office in every level of government including sixteen black members of Congress, a governor in Louisiana and in South Carolina a majority in the legislature. These black led Republican governments were progressive or liberal in today’s language passing legislation for public schools, aid to the blind and the deaf, and stronger labor and civil rights laws.
REDEMPTION
The South’s defeated confederates fiercely opposed Radical Reconstruction and began to launch a campaign called Redemption. These “Redeemers” sought to overthrow Republican rule and replace it with a Democratic Party firmly committed to white supremacy. Redeemers used a variety of tactics to overthrow Republican rule, including violence, voter fraud, and race-baiting electoral campaigns. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan organized a campaign of terror against black elected officials. The Klan and other similar organizations threatened, harassed, and assassinated politically active African Americans across the South. By 1877 the Democratic Party had largely destroyed the Republican Party infrastructure in the South and seized control of most state and local governments. The same year, Congress officially ended Reconstruction in a political deal known as the Tilden-Hayes compromise.
SPANISH AMERICAN WAR
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